posted my review of:
20th Century Portraits: Isang Yun Chamber Music (Novellette, Piano Trio, Duo for cello & harp, Sonata for violin & piano). Kolja Lessing (violin), Walter Grimmer (cello), Holger Groschopp (piano), Maria Graf (harp), Roswitha Staege (flute). Capriccio 67 116 (2005)
Good deed done.
Funny, a few days ago I had this pervert blast of listing all the B-composers in my collection – a lot of them! – and today I read in the newspaper the review for a book, by Gabriel Josipovici, “Infinity”, the story of an imaginary, self-conceited, Italian composer, Pavone (seen and recounted by his butler, Massimo), who finds no value in any music or any composer before him, and one of Pavone’s pronouncements is quoted (I’m translating back from French, so this might no be accurate with the original English: “Britten is a disaster. Dallapiccola a disaster. Nono a disaster. Berio a disaster. Bussotti a disaster. Did you ever notice, by the way, Massimo, he said, how many composers have names that begin with letter B?”
Sure, I noticed. And Cs, and Ds, and Ms, and Ps, and Rs and Ss. I need to chekc on Gs and Ts. As I said in my earlier post, there’s still a little place for the extremes in the world of contemporay music, As or X-Y-Zs.
Maybe this Pavone is inspired by Scelsi.
Brought over from Amazon my review of Lauren Newton: Filigree. hatOLOGY 519 (1998). She’s an American avant-garde Jazz vocalist, more active and noted in the German-speaking countries than in the US. Not my habitual listening, but, as usual, one thing led to the other. Not a recent listen either, but I needed to put up the CD after writing down the info about the other releases from the label, HatHut, an interesting Swiss label specialized (besides avant-garde jazz) in the 20th century avant-garde. Many releases of the so-called “New York School” (Cage, Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff), of Rzewski, Scelsi, Ustvolskaya, Stockhausen, and more.